tedious back-and-forth with dialacestarvy

You guys go on defending SJWs as if they aren’t reactionaries themselves. It’s a moronic lynch mob operating on the non logic of a moral panic. The brand of feminism that tabloid sites like Jezebel and Feministing churn out shares more in its cultural logic with reactionary bigotry than it does with anything that is authentically left wing and authentically concerned with social justice.

Since when would social justice have anything to do with demonizing the sexuality of others and persecution politics? Isn’t it obvious that much of modern feminism retains the bigoted and bourgeois assumptions of 20th century privileged white women? Could you not see that in the fall out of that Holler Back video?

It has absolutely nothing to do with justice or equality and its destroying the left. They are essentially taking the demonization and distrust we reserved for men who were minorities and are extending it to all men. And all in the name of protecting women and children, who the so called gender egalitarians curiously conflate in ways not even the right wing would do.

Isn’t that identical to any lynch mob? They’re always lynching the boogeyman to protect women and children, aren’t they? Was Emmett Till a “street harasser?” Are you guys dumb enough to think that the Klan which lynched them didn’t feel the same righteous indignation and desire to protect women from the bad guys that you guys feel when you’re bleating and mewling about people like Paul Elam?

Pop quiz. Give the righteous, chivalrous lynch mob little uniforms, jack boots, and truncheons and what do you get? That is quite literally what fascism was, an organized lynch mob. Oh, you think that’s hyperbole? Ever bother to look at war time propaganda which designated the Jew as the lecherous menace of virginal “Aryan” women?” Or the “Jap” as the dehumanized boogeyman menacing American white women?

The American version of the early post ww I fascist groups which sprouted in every western country was the Klan revival in the wake of DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a movie about a black guy who rapes a white woman. Watch a film like Fritz Lang’s M, which is about the vigilante justice of a Weimar-era mob against the nefarious male boogeyman sex criminal which is necessary because the state is illegitimate or ineffective. The truth is that men have been falling all over themselves to play hero for women or else risk shame for a millennia and this has been the most powerful mechanism to get them to die in conflicts by the millions for the benefit of a ruling class.

The reality is that a lot of you have no serious engagement with feminist ideas because you’re afraid to even question it if it will get you branded the misogynist, fedora wearing creep, the embittered loser who is unattractive to women. And that is identical to what the workhorse, reactionary apologist for capitalism feels when he, in precisely the same way, refuses to question the capitalist system which pits him against the “losers” in the rat race who refuse “personal responsibility.”

He’s just as afraid of being seen as the lazy, entitled, whiner who couldn’t hack it in the labor pool as you are of being the fedora wearing loser whining about the sexual market place. Both you and they are quick to refuse the systemic or cultural context in which social phenomena occurs and insist on confusing it with “personal problems.” If you can’t see that very obvious parallel, you’re deluding yourself.

In both cases it is an excuse to remain indifferent to suffering. It’s frightened bottom feeders who have internalized the value system their exploiters because they’re afraid of losing their position on a social totem. The apologist for capitalism depoliticizes his condition, feels shame, and blames himself. The apologist for a gynocentric society that pits men against one another in order to conform to whatever male identity women approve of does the same, does he not? Your supposed identification with feminism is actually a product of chivalry, not a progressive or egalitarian understanding of gender.

If you take an idea seriously, you’ll ruthlessly criticize it. If it stands up to that criticism, it’s worth taking seriously, yeah? Yet none of you will ruthlessly criticize feminism’s utterly absurd and entirely erroneous interpretations of male reality or male sexuality. Instead you’re thinking “yeah, men are pigs, but I’m not a pig! I’m different!” and falling all over yourself to prove it. Get a clue, the average guy thinks he’s different than the average guy, just as the average working class reactionary thinks he’s a harder worker and more deserving than every other schmuck competing for the scraps from the master’s table.

Feminists will claim up and down that they already understand the male narrative, since it’s a male dominated society. Yet they will turn around and claim that masculinity is an artifice. So which is it, geniuses? Is it artifice or is it an authentic narrative?

What logic suggests is that you have an artificial male narrative. Now figure class into the picture and it looks like you have an artificial male narrative which would only be reflective of ruling class men. And all of this would assume that women could even interpret that narrative correctly and understand what it even meant to men at all.

Oh so it looks like you don’t have a male narrative, so I guess we can dispense with the empowered girl snark and “what about the menz!” bullshit. It looks like feminism has absolutely no understanding of the other half of the gender equation. Nor did it ever. How could it have? Which men were there to explain to them how they were getting it wrong? Were conservatives supposed to do that, because the left sure as fuck wasn’t going to do it. Nor will it do so now for the reasons mentioned above. Care to comment?

DialaceStarvy responded:

“Define SJW. You keep referring to this mysterious ‘they’, some American Ku Klux Klan Hitler facist lynch mob, and I have no idea who you’re talking about. Who’s the boogeyman here? It’s very presumptuous of you to think that men who support feminism do so only out of fear, even more so to think that all of them are heterosexual and care about being attractive to women, but I suppose you don’t even need any evidence for this since this is ‘the reality’.

The fact that you associate feminism with ‘men are pigs’ means that you should get a clue. I’m male and I have no idea what the hell ‘the male narrative’ is. I can tell you that masculinity is artificial in so far as it is a social construct. After all, some women are masculine and some men are not. You made a very strong claim at the end there. I’m sure there were plenty of men who explained to those fighting for women’s rights ‘how they were getting it wrong’. Ironic how there’s no ‘serious engagement with feminist ideas’ at all in your comment; it’s just one gigantic appeal to emotion.”

I responded:

I already defined “they,” I mentioned the tabloid Jezebel and Feministing brand of twitter and tumblr feminism. I really hope you have something more to offer than a no true Scotsman argument or some variation on “not all feminists are like that.”

Let’s just take Anita Sarkeesian for instance. If you just replaced “women” with “the family” or “children” in her argument, you’d have something identical to right wing social conservative scaremongering. We’ll all snicker and pat ourselves on the back for being sophisticated left wingers when the 700 club trots out arguments about how video games are evil, but the left forms a righteous blubbering lynch mob the moment you replace “children” with “women.”

That is classic reactionary bourgeois bullshit which assumes that the root of injustice or social dysfunction is “poor moral and life choices” rather than finding a systemic root. That is how it can function as moral critique and demonize the targeted and accused boogeyman. It’s because reactionaries and bigots do not recognize systems, only big bad villains who do what they do because they’re mean and evil or too stupid to know better.

Care to point me to feminists who have noticed this? Even just one. We currently have a gender discourse in which somebody could seriously write an article which argued that Elliot Rodger was the result of sexist assumptions we find in Seth Rogan movies and not one feminist called her on this. It’s a joke.

We’re in the dark ages in thinking about gender and that’s a curious state of affairs 40 years into the sexual revolution.

“It’s very presumptuous of you to think that men who support feminism do so only out of fear, even more so to think that all of them are heterosexual and care about being attractive to women, but I suppose you don’t even need any evidence for this since this is ‘the reality’. ”

There’s really nothing presumptuous about it, unless you want to seriously argue that a male can take exception to a “safe space” clause in the bylaws of your union without immediately being suspected of being a “rape apologist” or about a thousand other sinister or vicious male stereotypes and boogeymen by virtually everybody within earshot. At this point you’re just playing make believe. But you wouldn’t take exception to it if you had internalized that belief system, and we would do this because we’re rationalizing or not seriously engaging with feminist ideas. It’s safer and easier that way. If we were doing it, we wouldn’t necessarily even know we were doing it.

That is in fact how all sexism works. We retain unexamined and unconscious assumptions, don’t we? Wouldn’t those sexist assumptions obviously entail ideas about one’s own gender as well as the opposite gender? If masculinity was about protecting women in chivalrous fashion so as to avoid the suspicion of being the bad guy and affect the good guy role, savior of the damsels and winner of women’s approval, you’re telling me that male feminists would recognize their own chivalry and deference to women in these debates as sexism? Would they even recognize this dynamic at all if they believed, as many feminists do, that masculinity is conscious of itself and concerned only with power over women at their expense?

“The fact that you associate feminism with ‘men are pigs’ means that you should get a clue. ”

I don’t think so. In fact, that’s pretty much what it boils down to. It hides behind elaborate theoretical tropes, jargon, and abstraction to essentially argue that all men are pigs. See if you don’t get branded an “alt bro,” “brocialist” or “mackivist” “misogynist” “creep” or rape apologist for suggesting such a thing. Indeed, it’s threatening to women and oppressive to even engage with feminism critically at all.

But even if this wasn’t the tripe on offer from academic feminism, it’s certainly the case that the twitter and tumblr feminism that most people identify with the SJW crowd is essentially making this argument. Just because you magnanimously concede the possibility that men might be redeemed from their piggishness if they categorically agree with virtually everything you say or else be suspect really is pretty meaningless.

“I’m male and I have no idea what the hell ‘the male narrative’ is. I can tell you that masculinity is artificial in so far as it is a social construct. After all, some women are masculine and some men are not. ”

Nobody does because we don’t politicize masculinity. A male writer doesn’t think “I am writing a book from a male perspective,” while a female writer often will. This is supposed to be proof of male normativity and a male dominated society, but what it would also mean is that men don’t think about how their relationship to women would shape their self concept.

For instance, we know for a fact that women overwhelmingly choose men who make as much if not more than them for marriage. Married men out earn both women and unmarried men while marriage rates collapse at the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum while less so at the top. Yet we’re supposed to believe that the wage gap wouldn’t also be attributable to social pressure women create for men to be breadwinners? Think about how stupid that is.

Women entering the workforce in record numbers in the 1970s wouldn’t have solved this problem but would have compounded it if women still expect provider/breadwinner mates while simultaneously competing with men for the same jobs and driving their wages down. The fact that this could come about and put significant pressure on housseholds, labor, and virtually everyone else while lining corporation’s profits through cheap labor only underscores the extent that bourgeois feminism played useful idiot to neoliberalism. Yet curiously I see no feminist discourse on this. Do you? If so, where?

So what is the working class male narrative in a world where women still tie male worth to social status and professional distinction while men themselves are falling off the map and are estranged from all of societies’ most important institutions, from education, to marriage, to employment? Nobody knows but we can be certain that it’s probably not anything like “life being a video game set to easy.”

You mean to tell me you experience no cognitive dissonance or doubt when you spot a twitter feminist accusing a supposed misogynist of living in his mother’s basement and not having a job in the worst economy since the 1930s? We’re not allowed to consider what that means?

Feminists aren’t particularly interested and I’d say that’s problematic since they claim a monopoly on gender discourse. Indeed, we’re left to believe that all of this. should we even bother to acknowledge it, is the result of “the patrarichy,” which really means that somehow it is something men do to themselves or to one another. There is never a hint of the possibility that women have agency in this regard.

We can never consider the possibility that women create the social landscape in which male identity is formed. We’ll never consider the idea that women create social pressures which shape in an aggregate social sense what masculinity becomes. If you really think about it, that is fucking ridiculous. You’re telling me that there is some feminist discourse somewhere where women consider their own contribution to the very same masculinity they identify as the root of the patriarchy and female oppression? Where is it?

“You made a very strong claim at the end there. I’m sure there were plenty of men who explained to those fighting for women’s rights ‘how they were getting it wrong’. ”

Not really. I’ve given you a few examples. Go ahead and run them by feminists and see what reaction you get. I’ve had endless arguments with feminists about the “male gaze” and “objectification” for instance. They’re still parroting Susan Brownmiller and others who essentially were writing books about their own rape fantasies and attributing them to the patriarchy.

You can find no shortage of feminists 3rd wave or otherwise who still retain the belief that male sexuality is inherently oppressive if it is not the mirror image of female sexuality. Women can’t know what the experience of male heterosexuality is anymore than men could know what the experience of female heterosexuality is. And who would be there to explain it to them? Robert Jensen? I could go on and on.

I find it bizarre that I even have to. And you missed the point about the male narrative. I don’t know it, neither do you. But feminists claim to know it. That is in fact the argument on offer as to why it’s not worth considering the male experience. We’re supposed to have already known it. It’s believed to be all that we know since it is a male dominated society.

He responded:

“What exactly is ‘Twitter and Tumblr feminism’? Do you just mean ‘things I’ve seen on Twitter and Tumblr that I think are feminist’? Committing the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy requires a definition of a ‘Scotsman’ to begin with, and I’m pretty sure your definition of feminism is already along the lines of ‘men-hating lynch mob-ism’.

It also seems rather limiting to talk about feminism within the domain of some specific websites. You seem to want to make the biggest inferences from the smallest samples. I bet I could make Anita Sarkeesian say all sorts of things too if I changed a word here and there and give absolutely no context (or even quote a full sentence). It seems you want to seriously argue that assuming that men who support feminism are heterosexuals not wanting to upset their ‘ladies’ is not presumptuous.

Are you seriously complaining that people retaliate when you try to invade their safe spaces? You’re creating a “RAPE APOLOGIST” boogeyman out of it too.

‘For instance, we know for a fact that women overwhelmingly choose men who make as much if not more than them for marriage.’

No, I’m not sure how you know this ‘for a fact’.

I, for one, don’t. I also don’t know why you think social pressures are put on men by women only. They stem directly from gender roles – ‘man of the house’ and whatnot.

‘Yet curiously I see no feminist discourse on this.’

I see no discourse in general that this is what happened. Maybe you can provide some.

There’s a reason why I said your claim is strong. Look at all the things feminism has achieved in history and tell me how they were ‘getting it wrong’.

It makes you look ignorant and it doesn’t help that your entire attitude seems to be ‘but men have problems too’. You keep talking about ‘engaging with feminist ideas’ but I’ve yet to see you even mention any feminist ideas, let alone engage them. Frankly, you haven’t demonstrated that you even know what feminism is. This is not to mention that you have provided zero evidence for your claims.”

I responded:

“It seems you want to seriously argue that assuming that men who support feminism are heterosexuals not wanting to upset their “ladies” is not presumptuous. Are you seriously complaining that people retaliate when you try to invade their safe spaces? You’re creating a ‘RAPE APOLOGIST’ boogeyman out of it too. ”

Is this argument even for real? Why would their heterosexuality even matter? It’s not relevant since we all are picking up the same assumptions about women, their supposed vulnerability, and whatever else from the same culture. It’s not like a gay or bisexual male is going to be any more comfortable with the label of “rape apologist” or “misogynist.”

What is relevant is that we are socialized with unexamined assumptions about gender. It’s called “sexism” or something. A sexism that we wouldn’t understand because, again, how would we if there hasn’t been a dialogue for the past generation? And there hasn’t.

Again, who would have provided the other side of this dialogue?

The left isn’t going to ask questions about how women contribute to the construction of masculinity for obvious reasons. And I guess the evidence of that is the fact that they haven’t already. And the right wouldn’t provide that side of the dialogue because they aren’t attempting to deconstruct or question masculinity one way or the other but instead attempt to champion it.

“I bet I could make Anita Sarkeesian say all sorts of things too if I changed a word here and there and give absolutely no context (or even quote a full sentence). ”

This completely missed the point. I’m not making her say anything, I’m revealing the logic of what she did say. I’m showing you how it is identical to the bigotry that is common to reactionary bourgeois thinking. What would be the practical difference be if I swap “women” with “the family and children?” None. See?

I didn’t make her say anything, she said it herself. That was the point which you weirdly seem to be twisting yourself into pretzels to avoid even though I’m sure it was obvious. If she said “video games make black men view women as objects they can rape and kill” or if she said “video games make Asian men view women as objects they can rape and kill,” or if she said “video games make men view women as objects they can rape and kill” what would the difference be?

If you want to argue that she never said this or argued it, we’re just being disingenuous. The whole point of virtually every video she’s made is that men are a threat to women and by extension these portrayals of women in video games perpetuate a culture in which men rape and kill women.

Otherwise, why should we give a flying fuck if women are killed in video games if it has no relationship to real world gender relations?

Do you think she was arguing something else? If so, what was it? If you want to pretend that Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t speak for all feminists, I’ll just ask yet again where the feminist criticism of such bigoted bullshit is? I haven’t been able to find it.

If I were a feminist, I might ask questions like “gee, Anita, doesn’t all this suggest that men are raping, violent monsters who need to be carefully policed and controlled lest they rape and kill women? Isn’t that kind of a bigoted idea that really only makes sense in the context of hysterical persecution politics? And aren’t you turning women into damsels in real life while simultaneously complaining about the “trope” in video games? Wouldn’t that be infinitely worse? And isn’t this kind of ridiculous since men are 4 times as likely to be murdered as women, who are themselves possibly the safest demographic that exists? And aren’t you perpetuating an archaic form of sexism that is old as the hills rather than combatting sexism?

That’s what I would ask because, y’know, I fail to see how gender equality or social justice of any kind would be possible if we regarded men this way rather than recognizing that they are human beings with agency and not wild animals. But what do I know?

“No, I’m not sure how you know this ‘for a fact’. I, for one, don’t. I also don’t know why you think social pressures are put on men by women only. They stem directly from gender roles – ‘man of the house’ and whatnot. ”

I’d be happy even for just the admission that women contribute to the construction of masculinity at all. We can’t even get that much out of our supposed “dialogue” on gender, not in 40 years of it. What does that mean? Why don’t we care enough to consider it? I don’t know. Neither does anyone else. I find that pretty curious, but I can see you don’t.

But actually, since you brought it up, it’s entirely possible that there is no masculinity apart from women because our roles aren’t equivalent. Geneticists, for instance, can show that we are descended from twice as many women as men. We know that there is far more variance in reproductive success for men than there is for women. Women are the limiting factor in human reproduction, while men are clearly expendable. In fact, it probably explains the sexual dimorphism of our species, since obviously a tribe short on women or which doesn’t prioritize their health and safety is going to fare worse than the tribe which does since it will limit its ability to reproduce itself.

We’re not talking biological determinism here, we’re simply talking about the material conditions in which human sexuality would have evolved. So really, men are at far greater risk of being weeded out of any given gene pool and we can see that this was overwhelmingly the case for the life our species going back a millennia, so uh… yeah, I think it’s entirely possible that masculinity doesn’t even belong to men to define or redefine.

This is not a determinist crackpot evo-psych argument, since it’s possible for men to define it or for women to, in theory, recognize the social power they have, but none of that would be possible if nobody recognizes that social power or male inability to define masculinity for themselves. It’s entirely possible that when men judge or shame each other, when they judge themselves or adopt identities, that this is really just based on their perception of what women want and expect.

Unlike the majority of women, men don’t have intrinsic value in any given mating pool. So, in the same way that employees can’t dictate to employers what employers want, it would appear that there is some doubt as to if masculinity has any other origin except women’s mating preference.

Even if you yourself didn’t care about it at the time of your socialization, you were socialized among males whose ideas about themselves and you were based on their projections of their insecurities about not being attractive to women. Since most people are heterosexual, it’s really irrelevant if you’re gay, asexual, bi or whatever, since you’re still shaped and affected by the same culture and everything you can possibly know about yourself and others is formed within that context, no?

“There’s a reason why I said your claim is strong. Look at all the things feminism has achieved in history and tell me how they were ‘getting it wrong’.It makes you look ignorant and it doesn’t help that your entire attitude seems to be ‘but men have problems too’. ”

I’m not really sure what it’s achieved. For instance, an antifeminist can ask a question like “does a homeless black man oppress a wealthy white woman?” And the feminist will trot out intersectionality theory, but what he or she will miss is that the wealthy white man who was her husband is only her husband because he was an acceptable mate to her or her family in a hypothetical patriarchy.

Therefore, he is only her mate because he successfully contributed to the very same system which would produce the homeless black man.

So if we consider the economic, political, and social consequences of the social landscape women provide for men, what have they really achieved? The ability to oppress the homeless black guy directly? And since women still marry breadwinners and since men face that social pressure from women, what would it matter if more congressmen or MPs were women as a male dominated government or corporate leadership may very well simply be a measure of male social weakness rather than their power.

Why do we think it’s a privilege to be on the hook for performing economically or else being deemed worthless? Obligations are not privileges. What a ridiculous and simplistic understanding of power to think that it would be measurable by the gender of political representation anyway. That’s laughable and yet feminists have assumed this for decades. It would only make sense if we thought that genders were like social classes when clearly they are not.

We can pretty clearly see that women were always half of society and that far from being oppressed, they had different forms of social power particular to their gender. Ruling class men were part of a ruling class society, half of which was female. Women were always the arbiters of acceptable male behavior and identity. So female ideas about maleness absolutely shape male identity. Do black ideas about whiteness shape white identity? See why we can’t think of genders as though they are classes?

So what have feminists really accomplished other than obscuring this fact and producing a situation in which only male obligations and female privileges specific to their gender remain? Do you think women being CEOs of companies that profit from slave labor under the boot of western backed dictatorships is an accomplishment? Is it an accomplishment to have destroyed the ability of households to stay afloat on a single income? Was it an accomplishment to push lower working class and working class women into low wage professions because their husbands incomes could no longer support a family, even when those women would have preferred a choice? How many of these accomplishments are only accomplishments if we’re looking at it through a bourgeois white woman’s understanding of the world?

He responded:

“It’s hard to think that you’re being honest here when you’re using terms like “misogynist, fedora wearing creep, the embittered loser who is unattractive to women’. Honestly, I don’t know how you guys get called ‘rape apologist’ and ‘misogynistic’ so easily.

‘We all are picking up the same assumptions about women, their supposed vulnerability, and whatever else from the same culture.’

Do you see why women need to be empowered in our culture?

‘What is relevant is that we are socialized with unexamined assumptions about gender.’

Think about that.

‘Video games make men view women as objects they can rape and kill.’ It looks to me like the blame is on video games rather than men. In fact, everything I’ve heard from Anita has been criticising video games, not men.

I also have no idea where you’re getting this ‘men are wild animals’ shit from. Forgive me if I find ‘it’s entire possible’ arguments and home-cooked psychology unconvincing. Basing your views on this hypothesis is highly suspect, especially since it’s basically an ‘evolutionary conspiracy’.

It’s interesting though; I’ll give you that.

‘For instance, an antifeminist can ask a question like ‘does a homeless black man oppress a wealthy white woman?’

No, but a homeless black woman would certainly have had it much worse, and a wealthy white man would have had it better than a wealthy white woman. Have some control over your variables.

‘We can pretty clearly see that women were always half of society and that far from being oppressed, they had different forms of social power particular to their gender.’

Be ignorant about historical feminism all you want, but you better have some good fucking historical papers to back this view up.

‘Women were always the arbiters of acceptable male behavior and identity.’

Are you telling me most women wanted to be treated as nothing more than sex objects and baby makers for millennia? I can do this shit too: ‘workers were always the arbiters of acceptable working conditions.’ I don’t know why gender and wealth can’t both be sources of inequality.

I suppose by your reasoning black people should stay slaves so they aren’t part of the bourgeoisie and oppressing white working class people. I’ve yet to see a single one of feminist ideas you so like to engage.

Can you please indulge me?”

I responded:

” Do you see why women need to be empowered in our culture?”

No, but I see why you think they do. I also see why you would go on thinking that no matter what the reality was. Y’know, we’re not hunter gatherers, we have complex social orders. In fact, even hunter gatherers had social orders. What this means is that physical strength doesn’t really equal power. In a society, power goes to whoever has the public perception of moral rectitude.

For instance, Dick Cheney was a fat old man with a heart condition, but nobody would argue that he wasn’t powerful as the American VP, would they? So what about women and empowerment? Are you sure they aren’t already empowered? For instance, why does nobody care about a 30% rise in male suicide rates in one decade but they care about breast cancer awareness? Why was it that people only seemed to notice Boko Haram kidnapping girls but not their murder of boys? Men are far more likely to be victims of violence than women, yet we obsess about women’s safety when they are already the safest demographic that exists.

It would seem to me that in a social order, power would go to those we cared about and advocated for. Wouldn’t it? I’m pretty sure power in a society goes to whoever can get the guys in funny monkey suits with weapons to coerce others on their behalf no? Or do we think power is just having muscles?

Also, how do we know how it went down in hunter gatherer societies? Apparently women weren’t in that much danger, since they were twice as likely to pass on their genes as men were. Why do we think men dragged women by their hair and dominated them? In fact, I think it’s far more likely such behavior would have gotten your head bashed in with a rock by a father or brother, or maybe ostracized which would have meant death. Why couldn’t this have been the case? Because we prefer to think of women as victims in need of our protection against the big bad misogynists and the patriarchy crew?

“‘What is relevant is that we are socialized with unexamined assumptions about gender.’ Think about that.”

I did, but I can’t possibly see how you would have done the same. See, I really thought about it, rather than just defaulting to the women are victims, men are either heroes or victimizers script. Why do you think that this is a progressive view of gender? Isn’t this what people always believed about men and women? Because they always believed it, the feminist damseling of women and refusal to recognize women’s agency in anything doesn’t challenge their archaic, centuries old thinking about gender, but powerfully reinforces their sexism, yeah?

“It looks to me like the blame is on video games rather than men. In fact, everything I’ve heard from Anita has been criticising video games, not men. I also have no idea where you’re getting this “men are wild animals” shit from. ”

I already addressed this. You’re just being purposefully obtuse. Men are not violent raping monsters because they play video games. And if she’s not arguing that video games will make men rape and kill, then, again, why should any of us care?

That’s nice. I guess I’d agree with you maybe if you could provide a counter thesis. I guess it’s just “unconvincing,” a gut feeling, intuition maybe. Ok. There’s no evolutionary conspiracy. It’s just what would logically follow from the fact that men can mate many times a day while women have to screen for parental investment. What would logically follow is that all women would have value in an economy of mates, while only some men will. That is a pattern seen elsewhere in other species characterized by what biologists call “female choice,” and all evidence, like the fact that we are descended from twice as many females as males indicates that it’s the same with us, barring external factors.

“No, but a homeless black woman would certainly have had it much worse, and a wealthy white man would have had it better than a wealthy white woman. Have some control over your variables. ”

The homeless black woman might have it worse, although most services are geared towards women. Indeed most homeless people are men. So you’re dead wrong about that. As far as the wealthy white woman having it worse than the man, that’s debatable if it’s the man who doesn’t have options in life while she does.

For instance, she can choose to work or not while he can only work. And this was always the case. Even under Sharia law, a woman’s income is her own while a husband’s belongs to the family. See, men were always expected to take care of women and children and laws always reflected that. Which is why a man at one time could have been punished for the crimes of his wife and so on. Indeed, the whole reason she or her family chose him as a mate is because of his successful contribution to that system.

So all those ruling class men, in order to be socially integrated, made decisions in their life which would put them in a position to qualify as providers. We need only ask what would happen to them if they failed in this. We can look at the long history of forgotten lower class men without stable employment who didn’t mate or who worked themselves to death in dangerous health destroying occupations for the “privilege” of being on the hook to support a wife and children.

Today it is still the case that 90% of workplace injuries and deaths in the United States are experienced by men. I’m sure they work those jobs because they’re patriarchal privileged oppressors. You could in fact make the argument that women of the ruling class were a leisure class, that is if you’re willing to let go of the damsel in distress trope which makes our unexamined chivalry so emotionally satisfying.

When you start to recognize that women always had social power and agency specific to their gender, history looks a lot different.

“Are you telling me most women wanted to be treated as nothing more than sex objects and baby makers for millennia? I can do this shit too: “workers were always the arbiters of acceptable working conditions.”

They were never treated as sex objects anymore than men are treated as mules or units of utility. Why is it worse to be the baby maker than the guy who works to support the baby? And why do we think men chose this situation if women to this day insist on marrying only breadwinners? That is overwhelmingly the case. Unless you have some other explanation for the breakdown of the wage gap.

Would you agree that the drug war is really a race war? It’s always been a way of criminalizing elements of society we disapprove of if we’re racist reactionaries. So, in the U.S., when we needed to criminalize the existence of Mexican immigrants, we associated Marijuana with them and banned it. When we wanted to associate raping white women with amphetamine crazed blacks, we banned cocaine. It’s always been a way of waging war on people we find threatening.

The suffragettes, who were basically bourgeois respectable white women, were the decisive force in getting alcohol prohibited. They were able to do this by holding up the poor, battered damsels as paragons of child like innocence and virtue in contradistinction to the brutish men who drank. These men were of course understood to be working and lower class men, especially immigrants. See how that works?

Women have always been the arbiters of acceptable male behavior and identity. Indeed they are even today, which is precisely why we’re afraid to think of them as anything other than damsels who need us to save them.

It gets a lot more interesting when you start looking at ruling class women’s investment in sexual morality. The further you go down the rabbit hole having taken off the chivalry blinders, the more you begin to realize that.. well… women are people who had historical agency! Isn’t that a crazy thought? It’s almost as if they weren’t children! Wild, eh?

“don’t know why gender and wealth can’t both be sources of inequality. I suppose by your reasoning black people should stay slaves so they aren’t part of the bourgeoisie and oppressing white working class people. ”

Wait, what? First of all, why would the choice be either to enslave others or be slaves themselves? Where was this ever the choice that anyone faced? Second, is your argument that slave masters have no agency or choice? Then why would the white ones have a choice? Third, why wouldn’t we condemn anyone for oppressing anyone else? Isn’t this the radical left? Or did I get lost on my way to Stefan Molyneux’s page. Fourth, gender and wealth are both sources of inequality, but one form of inequality impacts the other form directly. Fifth, you seem to be suggesting that the poor womenfolk were just along for the ride and had no choice, but then neither did their husbands if they were competing for wealth and social status so that they could successfully win their wives and provide for their families.

So who oppressed who?

That last one is easily solved when we recognize that neither gender oppresses the other and that both had forms of privilege and obligation that were specific to them. And if you factor class into it, it becomes clear that the overwhelming majority of men throughout history had just as little choice as their wives, and sometimes much more obligation.

For some weird reason, when you think of men you imagine ruling class men, and when you think of women, you seem to imagine lower class, powerless women. You can’t seem to wrap your head around ruling class women and lower class men. Instead of trying to do it, why not ask the more interesting question which is why I had to ask you to do it in the first place. Why didn’t feminists?